University Avenue's auto dealers are headed to suburbia

A row of sparkling, new Ford trucks in Ron Saxon's showroom faced the broad commercial avenue that was once the heart of St. Paul's automotive dreams.

They won't be there long.

"It's just not a new-car mecca any more,'' said Saxon, who is closing his new-car dealership on St. Paul's University Avenue this week, consolidating the business at family dealerships in New Brighton and Inver Grove Heights. "It hurts, but that's the way it goes.''

Like those glossy Explorers, the steel, rubber and magic of the car culture are slowly pulling away from University Avenue.

Home to 10 new-car dealerships just two decades ago, the avenue will now have only two. While University is still a place where alternators are rebuilt and used-car lots offer easy credit, the historic transit corridor from St. Paul to Minneapolis is changing.

Dealerships have fled to vast suburban strips. New development is pushing up land values along parts of University. Rail transit may soon make a comeback there.

All that is being felt at curb level. If the car is to remain king of University, it will have to share its realm with the latest transport fashion.

And that is as it should be. University Avenue, from horse to trolley to car to bus and now, perhaps, back to train, has ridden the transportation wave of the moment. It is a living museum of people-moving.

"This is probably unparalleled, the breadth and depth of transportation history associated with one street in America,'' said Brian McMahon, a historian of the avenue's role in transportation and executive director of University United, a civic and business group in the Midway area.

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A NATURAL EVOLUTION

The vehicles departing Ron Saxon Ford's showroom for the suburbs are part of that transportation lineage, particularly the five-mile segment running from the state Capitol in St. Paul to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

It connects the brainless with the brainy, one denizen of the avenue chirped last week.

Envisioned in the 1870s as a parkway to rival the Champs Elysees of Paris, the 120-foot-wide thoroughfare instead became a workingman's street. Horses were stabled near Prior Avenue and bought and sold across the street. The first streetcar line connecting the two cities began clanging down the center of University in 1890.

When Henry Ford and his rivals began mass-producing the automobile, University Avenue was in the forefront. Ford assembled Model T's and instructed auto mechanics in a three-story plant that opened near the Capitol in 1914. It was a "gravity-fed" plant before the days of linear assembly lines -- assembly began on the top floor and proceded downward to the ground floor. The plant was no longer needed when Ford opened its sprawling Highland Park assembly plant in 1925.

At the other end of the avenue, near University and Highway 280, Willys-Overland autos were assembled during the same period. The Willys-Overland factory also produced airplanes during World War I.

The Midway area grew into one of the nation's largest trucking centers after World War I, according to St. Paul historian Virginia Kunz. Murphy Trucking had offices at University near Prior. International Harvester, meanwhile, took over the Overland building to manufacture farm implements.

University Avenue, then and now, was a busy street. "You had bikes, horses, trucks cars, buses and trolleys, all competing for space on University,'' McMahon said.

The step from car-making to car-selling was a natural.

The broad avenue had acres of land and was close to where people lived. By 1946, there were 14 new-car dealerships on University Avenue, said Scott Lambert, executive vice president of the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association.

CAR CULTURE

Saxon and the two remaining dealers have long histories.

Tom Krebsbach, owner of Midway Chevrolet on University near Hamline Avenue, said his dealership dates back to 1922. Steve Whitaker, president of Whitaker Buick Jeep, on University west of Lexington Avenue, said his father opened the dealership in 1954. Saxon opened his Ford dealership on University Avenue at Marion Street in 1956.

"There wasn't any perimeter freeway activity,'' Saxon said. "No I-94. Streets that had stop signs every three or four blocks.'' Lake Street in Minneapolis and Grand Avenue in St. Paul were also centers of auto dealers.

"I think the era from 1950 through 1980 was pretty much the heyday,'' said Saxon. He names all the "stores'' selling new cars during that period, and their products were primarily American-made -- Fords, Chevys, Plymouths, Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Lincoln-Mercurys.

In the fall, dealers covered their showroom windows or draped tarps over the new models to keep the details secret until they were introduced in a blaze of floodlights. "It was a real party atmosphere,'' said Lambert of the dealers' group. Gas was cheap, the trolleys were on their way out and venues like Porky's drive-in catered to the avenue's emerging car culture.

FOLLOWING THE BUSINESS

The last trolleys ran on University Avenue in 1953, giving way to cars and buses. University lost its status as the primary Twin Cities corridor in 1968 when Interstate 94 opened a few blocks to the south. The freeway cemented the car culture but also allowed urban car dealers to follow the population shift to the suburbs, where they developed huge, floodlit vehicular parks along busy interstates.

Saxon said that although the company will still have a used-car operation on the avenue, it is hard for him to leave.

"It really broke my heart,'' he said of his decision. "I was born in raised in St. Paul ... my whole life has been as a St. Paul guy. But it's just very hard to have the square footage within the city for a car dealership.''

Whitaker said he has benefited from loyal customers, some of whom have purchased as many as 20 cars from the dealership over the years. But he added that suburban locations offer much that the cities cannot.

"If you were opening up a new dealership, this is not the place where you would start today,'' he said.

Krebsbach believes that after 83 years, Midway Chevrolet will survive whatever the urban planners throw at him. He worries about light-rail disruption, but also envisions a sea change on the avenue: neighborhoods fixed up, once-derelict intersections revitalized and a much safer, busier avenue emerging in its place.

"We have to make sure the St. Paul community realizes that University Avenue is not what it was 10 years ago, or even five years ago,'' he said.

PAST AS FUTURE?

Many of the auto sites of the past have passed into history. McMahon of University United is trying to save the old Ford assembly building near the Capitol, once slated for demolition. The horse market at University and Prior is now home to the Eritrean Community Center.

The Overland factory near Highway 280 is now a spectacular office building. And those old streetcar tracks are still resting under the pavement of University Avenue.

Internal combustion still has a strong hold on University. There is no shortage of repair shops, auto glass specialists, muffler shops, tire dealers and auto parts shops. And getting around remains the avenue's primary business. The Greyhound Terminal at University near Rice Street and the Amtrak station just off University on Transfer Road are part of the tradition.

And a half-century after the trolleys stopped their clamorous journeys, they could soon reappear in a quieter, sleeker incarnation.

Light-rail transit, a success along Hiawatha Avenue in Minneapolis, is proposed for the University Avenue corridor between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its construction is not assured and could be five to seven years in the future. But it has strong support among city officials, and many people working on University have come to believe a train in the center of the street is the inevitable next step.

Already, some fear the "Grand-ification" of University, turning this hard-working street into a place where you can find gifts, coffee and artsy retailers but no one who speaks torque and compression.

"It's a whole different world, from here to Grand Avenue,'' said Steve Tanski, president of Walters Rebuilders, which breathes new life into starters, alternators and generators on University. Added Krebsbach: "This will not be another latte/wedding dress zone.''

But changes are expected. Rising property values along University Avenue could make it more profitable for auto dealers and related businesses to sell out and leave, said Susan Kimberly, director of St. Paul's Department of Planning and Economic Development. Like other parts of the city that have lost historic businesses, she said, "traditional uses are becoming 21st-century uses.''

Kimberly still has fond memories of the rounded fenders and crank windows of the avenue's old trolleys, and an equally sweet memory of buying a 1967 Camaro convertible at Whitaker Buick Jeep. There was a time, she said, when cars and trains sailed past one another on the busy avenue.

"There were lots of trolleys and lots of auto dealerships,'' she said. "They might co-exist again.''

Jim Ragsdale can be contacted at jragsdale@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5529.